National Institute of Virology needs AI and high-performance computing tools; confident of ICMR support: Director Priya Abraham

Leading virologist Dr Priya Abraham had taken over as director of the National Institute of Virology in Pune in November 2019, months before the pandemic hit the country. Since January 2020, when the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed at the institute’s laboratory, it has been at the fore of India’s pandemic response. In this interview with Moneycontrol, Abraham talks about the NIV’s role for the next stage as the viral enemy seems to have retreated and the threat of zoonotic diseases (that jump from animals to humans) looms large. Edited excerpts:

What is NIV doing about zoonotic diseases, which have a high chance of appearing given the changing climate and environmental conditions?

So NIV is helping with the establishment of satellite One Health Centre, Nagpur, which is geared to looking into animal and human infections and infections that could come from the environment, and the interplay between humans, animals and the environment. It should be ready definitely within the next two years. Already, pre-project activities such as construction of the initial part of the centre and now money has just been sanctioned to start building it.

Since NIV was involved in developing Covaxin, can it be modified to make it more effective against current and possibly future variants?

I am not able to say what the modifications are, but we have given different newer strains of the virus to Bharat Biotech. It’s up to them to throw it in and make a modified version. That is not our area. We give the live virus. We have given them at least five strains.

Scientists say genome surveillance will be a crucial tool to detect possible threats and prepare accordingly. How is NIV involved in that exercise?

Yes, whole genome sequencing for COVID surveillance is very important. NIV was one of the initial 10 regional genomic surveillance laboratories. We came into being in early 2021. And since then, we have also been contributing to the whole genomic sequence analysis or samples and positives that come to our laboratory, and we also give training to other Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) institutes and other viral research and diagnostic laboratories (VRDLs). So, as we speak, there are about 11 such labs that are giving their sequences to us… and then it is submitted to the public genome database known as GISAID (global open database of genome sequencing for influenza and SARS CoV viruses) and they are also approaching us now on how to analyse those sequences.

Is NIV doing work related to Ebola and other diseases that have not yet arrived in India but remain a concern in other parts of the world?

So presently, some of the very dangerous viral diseases would be Ebola, Lassa fever, Marburg virus and Yellow fever, for which we have the vector (Aedes species of mosquito) but for preparedness we spend time with the VRDLs. Our scientists train different laboratory staff from different VRDLs to identify and act if these viruses are found here. In case we have a breakout, we should have the wherewithal to test and quickly be alert.

Do you feel the need for additional funding support for NIV from the government?

The ICMR has supported us for all our work. We have not had a fund shortage… So far, we have been very comfortable. But if we want to increase our infrastructure, like for instance we want to have more powerful high-computing tools and expensive software, artificial intelligence that can enhance our capacity to make it a high-performance computing facility, you need to have more money to do that. But we are very confident that ICMR will support us towards that effort.

Are there plans to upgrade the bio-safely level BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories that you have?

We will be expanding our BSL-3 lab. We want to have a duplicate kind of setup where we can handle animals and animal infections as well as human infections. We hope to actually enhance that. Otherwise, we are quite equipped to handle live viruses.